Whittell Duesenberg: An Automotive Louboutin? (Video)

This month fancy footwear-maker Christian Louboutin lost a trademark infringement suit in which the company attempted to stop Yves Saint Laurent from selling shoes with distinctive red outsoles, the judge ruling that Louboutin’s trademark claim on the primarily color red was too broad to be upheld. YSL’s legal team also noted its client had been making shoes with red outsoles since the 1970s.

If that weren’t enough, your Honor, I’d point out Duesenberg did it in the 1930s.

Behold The Whittell Coupe, a 1929 Duesenberg Model J Long Wheelbase Coupe, with coachwork by the Walter M. Murphy Company of Pasadena, Ca. Called, with some justification, the “finest bespoke motorcar” ever built in the United States, the Whittell Coupe is a symphonic work of American Art Deco styling, dazzling arrayed on an enormous Duesenberg Model J chassis. Commissioned by the millionaire roué George Whittell Jr., the car cost $17,000 in 1931 – a nearly unimaginable sum in the first years of the Great Depression – and will go on the block Sunday at Gooding and Co.’s auction of classic automobiles in Pebble Beach, Ca., the final event of the Monterey

Peninsula’s Concours d’Elegance week.

Whittell, the scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, was all you could hope for in a dissolute American playboy. As a young man he literally ran off to join Barnum and Bailey circus. He kept a pet lion named Bill and a pet elephant, Mingo, that was killed in an airplane crash with Whittell at the controls. Cashing out only weeks before the Wall Street’s “Black Tuesday,” Whittell spent the Great Depression in a furious cash-burn fever of “exotic animals, female entertainment, Prohibition-era spirits and cutting-edge technology,” according to the Gooding catalog.

Whittell was also one of Duesenberg’s best clients, ordering a total of six Model J chassis from the Indiana-based car company. Of these, the Whittell Coupe is the last and most audacious. A two-seat car (not even a rumble seat) constructed on a vast long-wheelbase chassis, the Whittell Coupe glows in filaments of chrome and polished aluminum, with a unique faux-convertible top constructed of aluminum and a graceful, obsidian-black fuselage. Whittell ordered a number of quirky special features, including red-green (port-starboard) navigation lights; and a lock-able compartment behind the seats for, one must assume, hootch.

But the detail that seems most intriguing, most modern, is the car’s Chinese red undercarriage, very like a Louboutin patent leather pump (or a YSL, if you like). The first drawing by car’s designer, Franklin Q. Hershey – who would later lead Cadillac’s styling studio – shows the red undercarriage. Unfortunately, Hershey is no longer around to ask and the Murphy company destroyed its records when it went out of business in the 1930s, so we can only surmise the meaning of the red undercarriage.

The Whittell Coupe is not the only classic car with a red keel. However, the others I can think of are all cars on which the red body paint is continued underneath. The Whittell Coupe features the striking contrast between black above and red below. Because of that, and precisely like the shoe, the Whittell Coupe engages a kind of visual burlesque, a peekaboo quality of black-patent propriety above and red intimacy below, a glimpse of the forbidden, the flash of the lush heart of things. This grammar is familiar in other fine objet – the red lining of an opera cape, or the crushed velvet of cases for dueling pistols, or the silk lining of a fine valise. Want to go Jungian? We all begin life as a zygote, nestled in a warm red lining.

Perhaps you’ve got the shoes. How about the car to go with it? The Whittell Coupe, Lot 123, will be auctioned Sunday. For more information go to goodingco.com.

Comments (3 of 3)

It’s no wonder these Christian Louboutin pumps are selling out so fast, who knew purple looked so good with red? It’s not a color combination I would have chosen, but it works. Really, any color looks good with red, as long as it’s the red from Louboutin’s signature sole.http://www.2011louboutinsale.com/

1:54 pm August 18, 2011

Aaron S. wrote :

Not nearly in the same class, but the 442 optioned Oldsmobile Cutlass had red inner fenders.